The Andamanese are a diverse group of peoples indigenous to the Andaman Islands and part of the territory of the Federal Territory of the „Andaman and Nicobar Islands“ of India in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Andamanese peoples are among the diverse groups of the Negrito peoples because of their dark skin color and short stature. Andamanese used to lead a hunter and gatherer life, and seem to have lived in great seclusion for thousands of years. It is suggested that the Andamanese settled in the Andaman Islands during the last Ice Age period, about 26,000 years ago.[1]
Andaman peoples include the Jarawa and Greater Andaman people of Greater Andaman Island, the Jungle people of Rutland, the Ong people of Lesser Andaman Island, and the Sentinelese people of the North Sentinel. At the end of the eighteenth century, when they began their first continuous contact with the outside world, an estimated 7,000 Andamanese remained. In the following century, they perished largely as a result of disease, violence, and loss of land. Today, only 400–450 Andamanese still exist with the extinction of the Jungle people. Only the Garawa and Sentinelese people maintain a consistent independence, and reject most attempts to contact outsiders.
Andamanese are a scheduled tribe in the Constitution of India.
Origins:
It is likely that the Andaman Archipelago was inhabited by modern people from northeastern India across the land bridge connecting the Andaman Archipelago and Myanmar in the last Ice Age period, a scenario that is well in line with evidence from linguistic and paleoclimate studies.[2]
It was previously assumed that the ancestors of the Andamanese formed part of the first great coastal migration which was the first expansion of humanity out of Africa through the Arabian Peninsula and along coastal regions from the Indian mainland towards Southeast Asia, China and Oceania. The Andamanese are considered a pure form of the putative Negrito population, which displayed similar physical traits and was supposed to have been found throughout Southeast Asia. There are doubts about the existence of the Negrito population at the present time. Their commonalities may be the result of evolutionary convergence or a common history.
Until the late eighteenth century, the Andamanese people kept themselves free from outside influences by their categorical rejection of any form of communication, which included killing any foreigner who boarded ships, and the remoteness of the islands from any contact area. Thus, the ten great Andamanese tribes along with the four local groups are believed to have diverged from one another over thousands of years.[3]
Religion:
The fundamental belief system of the Andamanese is spiritual. Andamanese believe that all living things have energy that is reflected in humans. They believe that the universe is nothing but a complex edifice, and in each layer, there are living creatures and spirits moving in it. They consider the restriction of movement as a major danger to the order of nature, as every place has an energy or spirit that controls the movement of organisms in it.[4]
Spirits live in different parts of the forest and sea and can be divided into two main categories: those associated with natural phenomena such as earthquakes, thunder, rainbows, sea flows, and storms. The second category is concerned with spirits, that is, the spirits of the dead. When a person dies, his/her body undergoes a series of burial rituals; a secondary burial ritual that transforms the spirit of the dead into a spirit of benevolence that helps the living.[5]
Arts:
Each Andamanese dynasty has its own distinctive vision of drawing on the faces of men and women. They rely on clay face painting, and color their drawings with paint made of red, white or yellow clay mixed with water and/or pig fat. Face painting gets a lot of attention in all occasions and celebrations. A woman paints every member of her family.[6]
Men and women also make jewelry made of shells and various plant materials and wear them in the gatherings and singing, and here we meet a new color of arts after sculpture and painting, for singing in these tribes depends on the art of call and response. As for the sung poems, they narrate the legends and historical events of the tribe. In terms of melodies, they are like weeping and wailing. Here, when we talk about singing, we are going to meet other arts, such as poetic rhetoric and storytelling skill. And Andamanese use no musical instruments except for tambourine-like tablets.[7] We move on to another art, which is dancing. The dance in these tribes is carefully designed and organized, and for every occasion or celebration there is a special dance. Men and women are usually separated in dancing.[8]
Language
The Andamanese languages belong to the fifth language family in India, after Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro, and Sino-Tibetan.
It is also likely that the Andamanese language is related to other languages such as Austronesian, or the Indo-Pacific family, but the current consensus is that the Andamanese languages constitute a separate language family – or rather, two unrelated language families.[9]
Endangered
With the first British colonial presence and subsequent settlements, the protective isolation of the Andamanese peoples changed, leading to disaster for them. Lacking immunity to the infectious diseases common on the Eurasian mainland, the Jawar people abandoned their large habitats as a result of disease outbreaks in the southeastern regions of southern Andaman Island within four years (1789-1793) since the first British colonial settlement in 1789. Epidemics such as pneumonia spread Measles and influenza quickly took their toll, as did their alcoholism.
In the nineteenth century, measles killed 50% of the Andamanese population. By 1875, the Andamanese were already „on the verge of extinction“ and yet attempts to contact, subjugate and co-opt them continued unabated. In 1888 the British government instituted a policy of „organized gift giving“ that continued in various forms well into the twentieth century.
There is evidence to suggest that some sections of the British Indian administration were deliberately engaged in the extermination of the tribes. After the mid-nineteenth century, the British established penal colonies on the islands and an increasing number of mainland Indian and Karen settlers arrived, violating the former lands of the Andamanese peoples, accelerating the decline of the tribes.
Many Andamanese succumbed to British campaigns of revenge for the deaths of the sailors of a wrecked ship. In the Andaman Islands Campaign of 1867, dozens of Ong people were killed by British marines after the deaths of sailors from a wrecked ship, leading to the award of the Victoria Cross to four British soldiers.
In the 1940s, the Imperial Japanese Army bombed Jarawa for their hostility. The attack by the Japanese was criticized by many observers as a war crime.[10]
[1] https://www.indianmirror.com/tribes/andamanesetribe.html#:~:text=Andamanese%20tribes%20are%20of%20the%20islands%20of%20Andaman.,India%20were%20once%20on%20the%20verge%20of%20extinct.
[2] https://www.andamanisland.in/content/history-of-andaman#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20Andamanese%20tribes%20dates%20back%20to,The%20wondrous%20and%20diverse%20geomorphology%20of%20Andaman%20Islands
[3] https://realbharat.org/tribes-andaman-nicobar-islands/#:~:text=The%20Great%20Andamanese%20Tribe%20Thought%20to%20be%20the,They%20are%20pygmies%2C%20divided%20into%20ten%20major%20tribes.
[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1254079
[5] https://www.mapsofindia.com/andaman-nicobar-islands/culture/religion.html
[6] https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/andamanese
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUWoq3oYb7o
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcFEjpn8SlU
[9] https://languageshop.org/rare-language-fact-file-andamanese-languages/
[10] https://www.academia.edu/16225154/The_Great_Andamanese_An_Endangered_Tribe
